The Languages of the World

Kenneth Katzner

Part one of The Languages of the World (30 pages) is a survey
of the world's language families and part three (30 pages) is a
country-by-country survey. But the bulk of it (300 pages) is in part two,
an encyclopedia with entries on some 200 individual languages. Each of
these contains a sample text in the language, given in the principal
writing system (or sometimes systems) and then in translation, followed
by some brief background notes on the language, typically touching on
its status and history and ending with some examples of English words
derived from it.

The result is a fun volume to browse in. The original language texts are
mostly inscrutable, of course, but help to illustrate different writing
systems. The source passages are a mixed bunch. Some are traditional or
literary — Katzner has a penchant for Nobel Prize winners — sometimes
self-contained poems but more often excerpts from longer works, which
may prompt further exploration. Others are taken from text books;
they are often passages on linguistics or history themselves. And the
background information contains some fascinating tidbits: I was not
aware, for example, that Bengali ranked sixth in the world for number
of native speakers.

I can't recommend The Languages of the World as a reference, however.
In a few places it is dated or misleading. A Taiwanese origin for the
Austronesian languages is now broadly accepted, but here we find:

"The background and the details of the great Austronesian
migrations are still largely a mystery. The original homeland
of the people was no doubt somewhere in Asia, perhaps in India,
present-day Malaysia or Indonesia, or even Taiwan."

A bigger problem is that there is simply no room for more than a
few scattered facts on most languages. While there are five pages on
English (with passages from Old and Middle English) and four on "Chinese"
(covering Wu, Cantonese, et cetera as "dialects"), most of the entries
have only a few paragraphs of background information. On Bemba, for
example, we get no more than:

"Bemba is the most widely spoken language of Zambia. Its 3
million speakers live mainly in the northeastern part of the
country. Bemba is another of the Bantu languages."

There is hardly anything on grammar or phonetics, with more of a focus
on history and above all orthography, complementing the sample texts.

There is also no consistency in what information is provided. We are
told that Gujarati and Assamese are constitutional languages of India,
for example, and that Maithili (Bihari) is not, but left in the dark
as to the status of Marathi, Bengali, Oriya, Telugu, Kannada, Tamil,
or Malayalam, the other regional Indian languages covered.

The selection of languages is decidedly skewed. There are entries on a
score of minority Russian languages (including Bashkir, Chuvash, Kalmyk,
Mordvin, Udmurt, Mari, Komi, Nenets, Khanty, Buryat, Yaku, Evenki, and
Chukchi) and an entry on Sibo, "spoken by a mere 40,000 people in western
China", but no room is found for Balinese (with 4 million speakers in
a popular tourist destination) or Minangkabau (7 million speakers).
And there are entries on a dozen North American Indian languages,
some with only a few hundred speakers, but not a single indigenous
Papuan language. (Tok Pisin merits an entry, while Aranda is the sole
indigenous Australian language covered.)

A minor gripe is that there are no cross-references from parts one and
three into part two — when browsing the lists of languages belonging
to a language group or spoken in a country, it would be useful to
be able to see at once which are covered in more detail in part two.
And a formatting error has resulted in some unexpected blank pages.
But the layout of The Languages of the World is otherwise clean
and attractive — the handling of the different writing systems is
particularly impressive.

All of that probably gives too negative an impression. The Languages
of the World really is a fun volume to browse in: linguists may turn
up their noses at it, but for those who are simply curious its flaws
are minor. It will have particular appeal for those intrigued by writing
systems and the adaptation of alphabets for different languages.